The Recovered Forest. From the Picone Catastrophe to Mercadante

When the Lama Picone broke its banks in November 1926, some observers traced the cause to the deforestation of the Alta Murgia. The reasoning was simple: without trees, the soil could not retain water, and unrestrained water would rush downhill. But for engineer Pio Alberto Nencha, writing in the Rassegna Tecnica Pugliese, that was too easy an explanation. Floods, he argued, had always existed; they could not be blamed solely on the absence of trees. The real culprit was humankind, which had dared to build houses and factories along the course of the stream. The debate was far from academic. Deforestation had not been a natural accident but the outcome of political and economic choices that, since the late Middle Ages, had turned the Murgia into a vast field of agricultural exploitation. First came pastoralism, whose grazing depleted the vegetation and eroded the soil; then large-scale grain cultivation, which uprooted the scrub and left the land bare for much of the year. By the mid-nineteenth century, the landscape was already impoverished, and by 1913, under the heading “Forests and Chestnut Groves (boschi e castagneti),” national statistics recorded no data at all for forested land. The effects were plain to see: slope erosion, reduced soil permeability, violent runoff, alternating droughts and sudden floods. The Forest Law of 1877 had foreseen this, imposing conservation restrictions on deforested lands precisely to prevent landslides and floods. But those measures remained largely on paper. After the catastrophe of 1926, the authorities finally acted, launching a reforestation project in the upper Picone basin: the Mercadante Forest was born – a feat of environmental engineering before it was one of landscape design. It was a late act of reparation, yet a revealing one. If trees had been felled by centuries of extensive agriculture, they now became the green rampart defending the city. The flood thus carried with it a bitter lesson: disasters are not born of nature alone, as in a Leopardi vision of fate, but of historical, political, and social transformations that create vulnerability. Every tree that took root in Mercadante was, in the end, an admission of guilt.

___Stefano Daniele & Francesco Paolo de Ceglia